Alexa Rankings

A friend of mine use to often brag about his “Alexa Ranking”. He was so proud of it … I was happy for him, but I didn’t really understand what it was. And I wondered if Alexa ranings are so good – why didn’t I have one?

To sum it up, Alexa (owned by Amazon.com) tries to rank your website by its popularity on the web. Google ranks #1 because it is by far the most popular website. … They are pretty good at this for the first 100,000 or so websites. But after that – they get enough data to estimate how popular your website is, but not enough to give you an exact number on how it compares to others.

Why aren’t Alexa Rankings always accurate?

Accurately ranking all websites is a very big job. And unless ISP (internet service provider) companies start to do some major spying, it will never be done properly. Instead Alexa collects data from a few resources, such as the Alexa toolbar. If people who visit your website use these resources, it helps you gain popularity. If your website doesn’t use any of these resources and if nobody who uses the Alexa toobar visits your website, as far as they are concerned, your website might as well not exist.

How hard is it to get an Alexa ranking?

I admit – I never really put too much effort into getting an Alexa ranking. But I kept an eye out for my sites to rank for over a year. It wasn’t until I started to receive thousands of pageviews per month that I even showed up in Alexa Now that I am there, I am happy with the speed at which I am climbing the ranks.– From #9,502,386 to #7,906,256 in less than a month! … True, being #9 million at something isn’t all that impressive. But wow! Moving up 1.5 million spaces in a month? I am pretty proud of my website that has achieved that goal.